Parran (heard here on alto clarinet, E-flat contrabass clarinet, soprano saxophone and bamboo flute) has appeared on more than 50 recordings over the last three decades, including collaborations with The Band, Anthony Braxton, Don Byron, Anthony Davis, Julius Hemphill, New Winds, Yoko Ono, Alan Silva and Stevie Wonder among many others. He is also a veteran educator who lectures at City University of New York (CUNY) and teaches clarinet and saxophone at Harlem School for the Arts. In addition to his teaching and performing careers, he has been commissioned as a composer by organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation and the Helen W. Buckner Foundation.
A professional musician since the age of 12, Deutsch (heard here on Bazantar and sitar) is a classically trained bassist with extensive experience performing in orchestral and jazz ensembles as well as a wide variety of global folk traditions. He has a degree in Classical Contrabass Performance from the St. Louis Conservatory of Music and has studied privately with Ustad Imrat Khan (surbahar and sitar), Henry Loew (classical bass) and Tito Sompa (Congolese percussion). In 1999, he was awarded a patent for an instrument he invented called the Bazantar, a five-string acoustic bass fitted with an additional 29 sympathetic strings and four drone strings that is tuned in the tradition of North Indian music. He has recently collaborated with film composer David Julyan (Insomnia and Memento), Chicago- based experimental rock band Tortoise, virtuoso erhu player Yang Ying and creative improvisers such as Roy Campbell, Hamid Drake and William Parker.
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